Chapter 2

Thou to eastward carriest The keen savour of the foam,-- Thou dost bear unto the west Fragrance from thy woody home, Where perchance a house is thine Odorous of the oozy pine.

Eastward thee thy proper cares, Things of mighty moment, call; Thee to westward thine affairs Summon, weighty matters all: I, where land and sea contest, Watch you eastward, watch you west,

Till, in snares of fancy caught, Mystically changed ye seem, And the bird becomes a thought, And the thought becomes a dream, And the dream, outspread on high, Lords it o'er the abject sky.

Surely I have known before Phantoms of the shapes ye be-- Haunters of another shore 'Leaguered by another sea. There my wanderings night and morn Reconcile me to the bourn.

There the bird of happy wings Wafts the ocean-news I crave; Rumours of an isle he brings Gemlike on the golden wave: But the baleful beak and plume Scatter immelodious gloom.

Though the flow'rs be faultless made, Perfectly to live and die-- Though the bright clouds bloom and fade Flow'rlike 'midst a meadowy sky-- Where this raven roams forlorn Veins of midnight flaw the morn.

He not less will croak and croak As he ever caws and caws, Till the starry dance he broke, Till the sphery pæan pause, And the universal chime Falter out of tune and time.

Coils the labyrinthine sea Duteous to the lunar will, But some discord stealthily Vexes the world-ditty still, And the bird that caws and caws Clasps creation with his claws.

LUX PERDITA

Thine were the weak, slight hands That might have taken this strong soul, and bent Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent, And bound it unresisting, with such bands As not the arm of envious heaven had rent.

Thine were the calming eyes That round my pinnace could have stilled the sea, And drawn thy voyager home, and bid him be Pure with their pureness, with their wisdom wise, Merged in their light, and greatly lost in thee.

But thou--thou passed'st on, With whiteness clothed of dedicated days, Cold, like a star; and me in alien ways Thou leftest following life's chance lure, where shone The wandering gleam that beckons and betrays.

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES

She stands, a thousand-wintered tree, By countless morns impearled; Her broad roots coil beneath the sea, Her branches sweep the world; Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed, Clothe the remotest strand With forests from her scatterings made, New nations fostered in her shade, And linking land with land.

O ye by wandering tempest sown 'Neath every alien star, Forget not whence the breath was blown That wafted you afar! For ye are still her ancient seed On younger soil let fall-- Children of Britain's island-breed, To whom the Mother in her need Perchance may one day call.

HISTORY

Here, peradventure, in this mirror glassed, Who gazes long and well at times beholds Some sunken feature of the mummied Past, But oftener only the embroidered folds And soiled magnificence of her rent robe Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties That sweep the dust of æons in our eyes And with their trailing pride cumber the globe.-- For lo! the high, imperial Past is dead: The air is full of its dissolvèd bones; Invincible armies long since vanquishèd, Kings that remember not their awful thrones, Powerless potentates and foolish sages, Impede the slow steps of the pompous ages.

THE EMPTY NEST

I saunter all about the pleasant place You made thrice pleasant, O my friends, to me; But you are gone where laughs in radiant grace That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea. To storied precincts of the southern foam, Dear birds of passage, ye have taken wing, And ah! for me, when April wafts you home, The spring will more than ever be the spring Still lovely, as of old, this haunted ground; Tenderly, still, the autumn sunshine falls; And gorgeously the woodlands tower around, Freak'd with wild light at golden intervals: Yet, for the ache your absence leaves, O friends, Earth's lifeless pageantries are poor amends.

IRELAND

(DECEMBER 1, 1890)

In the wild and lurid desert, in the thunder-travelled ways, 'Neath the night that ever hurries to the dawn that still delays, There she clutches at illusions, and she seeks a phantom goal With the unattaining passion that consumes the unsleeping soul: And calamity enfolds her, like the shadow of a ban, And the niggardness of Nature makes the misery of man: And in vain the hand is stretched to lift her, stumbling in the gloom, While she follows the mad fen-fire that conducts her to her doom.

THE LUTE-PLAYER

She was a lady great and splendid, I was a minstrel in her halls. A warrior like a prince attended Stayed his steed by the castle walls.

Far had he fared to gaze upon her. "O rest thee now, Sir Knight," she said. The warrior wooed, the warrior won her, In time of snowdrops they were wed. I made sweet music in his honour, And longed to strike him dead.

I passed at midnight from her portal, Throughout the world till death I rove: Ah, let me make this lute immortal With rapture of my hate and love!

"AND THESE--ARE THESE INDEED THE END"

And these--are these indeed the end, This grinning skull, this heavy loam? Do all green ways whereby we wend Lead but to yon ignoble home?

Ah well! Thine eyes invite to bliss; Thy lips are hives of summer still. I ask not other worlds while this Proffers me all the sweets I will.

THE RUSS AT KARA

O King of kings, that watching from Thy throne Sufferest the monster of Ust-Kara's hold, With bosom than Siberia's wastes more cold, And hear'st the wail of captives crushed and prone, And sett'st no sign in heaven! Shall naught atone For their wild pangs whose tale is yet scarce told, Women by uttermost woe made deadly bold, In the far dungeon's night that hid their moan? Why waits Thy shattering arm, nor smites this Power Whose beak and talons rend the unshielded breast, Whose wings shed terror and a plague of gloom, Whose ravin is the hearts of the oppressed; Whose brood are hell-births--Hate that bides its hour, Wrath, and a people's curse that loathe their doom?

LIBERTY REJECTED

About this heart thou hast Thy chains made fast, And think'st thou I would be Therefrom set free, And forth unbound be cast?

The ocean would as soon Entreat the moon Unsay the magic verse That seals him hers From silver noon to noon.

She stooped her pearly head Seaward, and said: "Would'st thou I gave to thee Thy liberty, In Time's youth forfeited?"

And from his inmost hold The answer rolled: "Thy bondman to remain Is sweeter pain, Dearer an hundredfold."

LIFE WITHOUT HEALTH

Behold life builded as a goodly house And grown a mansion ruinous With winter blowing through its crumbling walls! The master paceth up and down his halls, And in the empty hours Can hear the tottering of his towers And tremor of their bases underground. And oft he starts and looks around At creaking of a distant door Or echo of his footfall on the floor, Thinking it may be one whom he awaits And hath for many days awaited, Coming to lead him through the mouldering gates Out somewhere, from his home dilapidated.

TO A FRIEND

CHAFING AT ENFORCED IDLENESS FROM INTERRUPTED HEALTH

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays This dire compulsion of infertile days, This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest! Meanwhile I count you eminently blest, Happy from labours heretofore well done, Happy in tasks auspiciously begun. For they are blest that have not much to rue-- That have not oft mis-heard the prompter's cue, Stammered and stumbled and the wrong parts played, And life a Tragedy of Errors made.

"WELL HE SLUMBERS, GREATLY SLAIN"

Well he slumbers, greatly slain, Who in splendid battle dies; Deep his sleep in midmost main Pillowed upon pearl who lies.

Ease, of all good gifts the best, War and wave at last decree: Love alone denies us rest, Crueller than sword or sea.

AN EPISTLE

(To N.A.)

So, into Cornwall you go down, And leave me loitering here in town. For me, the ebb of London's wave, Not ocean-thunder in Cornish cave. My friends (save only one or two) Gone to the glistening marge, like you,-- The opera season with blare and din Dying sublime in _Lohengrin_,-- Houses darkened, whose blinded panes All thoughts, save of the dead, preclude,-- The parks a puddle of tropic rains,-- Clubland a pensive solitude,-- For me, now you and yours are flown, The fellowship of books alone!

For you, the snaky wave, upflung With writhing head and hissing tongue; The weed whose tangled fibres tell Of some inviolate deep-sea dell; The faultless, secret-chambered shell, Whose sound is an epitome Of all the utterance of the sea; Great, basking, twinkling wastes of brine; Far clouds of gulls that wheel and swerve In unanimity divine, With undulation serpentine, And wondrous, consentaneous curve, Flashing in sudden silver sheen, Then melting on the sky-line keen; The world-forgotten coves that seem Lapt in some magic old sea-dream, Where, shivering off the milk-white foam, Lost airs wander, seeking home, And into clefts and caverns peep, Fissures paven with powdered shell, Recesses of primeval sleep, Tranced with an immemorial spell; The granite fangs eternally Rending the blanch'd lips of the sea; The breaker clutching land, then hurled Back on its own tormented world; The mountainous upthunderings, The glorious energy of things, The power, the joy, the cosmic thrill, Earth's ecstasy made visible, World-rapture old as Night and new As sunrise;--this, all this, for you!

So, by Atlantic breezes fanned, You roam the limits of the land, And I in London's world abide, Poor flotsam on the human tide!-- Nay, rather, isled amid the stream-- Watching the flood--and, half in dream Guessing the sources whence it rose, And musing to what Deep it flows.

For still the ancient riddles mar Our joy in man, in leaf, in star. The Whence and Whither give no rest, The Wherefore is a hopeless quest; And the dull wight who never thinks,-- Who, chancing on the sleeping Sphinx, Passes unchallenged,--fares the best!

But ill it suits this random verse The high enigmas to rehearse, And touch with desultory tongue Secrets no man from Night hath wrung. We ponder, question, doubt--and pray The Deep to answer Yea or Nay; And what does the engirdling wave, The undivulging, yield us, save Aspersion of bewildering spray? We do but dally on the beach, Writing our little thoughts full large, While Ocean with imperious speech Derides us trifling by the marge. Nay, we are children, who all day Beside the unknown waters play, And dig with small toy-spade the sand, Thinking our trenches wondrous deep, Till twilight falls, and hand-in-hand Nurse takes us home, well tired, to sleep; Sleep, and forget our toys, and be Lulled by the great unsleeping sea.

Enough!--to Cornwall you go down, And I tag rhymes in London town.

TO AUSTIN DOBSON

Yes! urban is your Muse, and owns An empire based on London stones; Yet flow'rs, as mountain violets sweet, Spring from the pavement 'neath her feet.

Of wilder birth this Muse of mine, Hill-cradled, and baptized with brine; And 'tis for her a sweet despair To watch that courtly step and air!

Yet surely she, without reproof, Greeting may send from realms aloof, And even claim a tie in blood, And dare to deem it sisterhood.

For well we know, those Maidens be All daughters of Mnemosyne; And 'neath the unifying sun, Many the songs--but Song is one.

TO EDWARD CLODD

Friend, in whose friendship I am twice well-starred, A debt not time may cancel is your due; For was it not your praise that earliest drew, On me obscure, that chivalrous regard, Ev'n his, who, knowing fame's first steep how hard, With generous lips no faltering clarion blew, Bidding men hearken to a lyre by few Heeded, nor grudge the bay to one more bard? Bitter the task, year by inglorious year, Of suitor at the world's reluctant ear. One cannot sing for ever, like a bird, For sole delight of singing! Him his mate Suffices, listening with a heart elate; Nor more his joy, if all the rapt heav'n heard.

TO EDWARD DOWDEN

ON RECEIVING FROM HIM A COPY OF "THE LIFE OF SHELLEY"

First, ere I slake my hunger, let me thank The giver of the feast. For feast it is, Though of ethereal, translunary fare-- His story who pre-eminently of men Seemed nourished upon starbeams and the stuff Of rainbows, and the tempest, and the foam; Who hardly brooked on his impatient soul The fleshly trammels; whom at last the sea Gave to the fire, from whose wild arms the winds Took him, and shook him broadcast to the world. In my young days of fervid poesy He drew me to him with his strange far light,-- He held me in a world all clouds and gleams, And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams. Anon the Earth recalled me, and a voice Murmuring of dethroned divinities And dead times deathless upon sculptured urn-- And Philomela's long-descended pain Flooding the night--and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come-- Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. And then a third voice, long unheeded--held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame-- Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the inseparable All. The first voice, then the second, in their turns Had sung me captive. This voice sang me free. Therefore, above all vocal sons of men, Since him whose sightless eyes saw hell and heaven, To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love. Yet dear is Keats, a lucid presence, great With somewhat of a glorious soullessness. And dear, and great with an excess of soul, Shelley, the hectic flamelike rose of verse, All colour, and all odour, and all bloom, Steeped in the noonlight, glutted with the sun, But somewhat lacking root in homely earth, Lacking such human moisture as bedews His not less starward stem of song, who, rapt Not less in glowing vision, yet retained His clasp of the prehensible, retained The warm touch of the world that lies to hand, Not in vague dreams of man forgetting men, Nor in vast morrows losing the to-day; Who trusted nature, trusted fate, nor found An Ogre, sovereign on the throne of things; Who felt the incumbence of the unknown, yet bore Without resentment the Divine reserve; Who suffered not his spirit to dash itself Against the crags and wavelike break in spray, But 'midst the infinite tranquillities Moved tranquil, and henceforth, by Rotha stream And Rydal's mountain-mirror, and where flows Yarrow thrice sung or Duddon to the sea, And wheresoe'er man's heart is thrilled by tones Struck from man's lyric heartstrings, shall survive.

FELICITY

A squalid, hideous town, where streams run black With vomit of a hundred roaring mills,-- Hither occasion calls me; and ev'n here, All in the sable reek that wantonly Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn, One may at least surmise the sky still blue. Ev'n here, the myriad slaves of the machine Deem life a boon; and here, in days far sped, I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate To her companions, how a favouring chance By some few shillings weekly had increased The earnings of her household, and she said: "So now we are happy, having all we wished,"-- Felicity indeed! though more it lay In wanting little than in winning all.

Felicity indeed! Across the years To me her tones come back, rebuking; me, Spreader of toils to snare the wandering Joy No guile may capture and no force surprise-- Only by them that never wooed her, won.

O curst with wide desires and spacious dreams, Too cunningly do ye accumulate Appliances and means of happiness, E'er to be happy! Lavish hosts, ye make Elaborate preparation to receive A shy and simple guest, who, warned of all The ceremony and circumstance wherewith Ye mean to entertain her, will not come.

VER TENEBROSUM

SONNETS OF MARCH AND APRIL 1885

I

THE SOUDANESE

They wrong'd not us, nor sought 'gainst us to wage The bitter battle. On their God they cried For succour, deeming justice to abide In heaven, if banish'd from earth's vicinage. And when they rose with a gall'd lion's rage, We, on the captor's, keeper's, tamer's side, We, with the alien tyranny allied, We bade them back to their Egyptian cage. Scarce knew they who we were! A wind of blight From the mysterious far north-west we came. Our greatness now their veriest babes have learn'd, Where, in wild desert homes, by day, by night, Thousands that weep their warriors unreturn'd, O England, O my country, curse thy name!

II

HASHEEN

"Of British arms, another victory!" Triumphant words, through all the land's length sped. Triumphant words, but, being interpreted, Words of ill sound, woful as words can be. Another carnage by the drear Red Sea-- Another efflux of a sea more red! Another bruising of the hapless head Of a wrong'd people yearning to be free. Another blot on her great name, who stands Confounded, left intolerably alone With the dilating spectre of her own Dark sin, uprisen from yonder spectral sands: Penitent more than to herself is known; England, appall'd by her own crimson hands.

III

THE ENGLISH DEAD

Give honour to our heroes fall'n, how ill Soe'er the cause that bade them forth to die. Honour to him, the untimely struck, whom high In place, more high in hope, 'twas fate's harsh will With tedious pain unsplendidly to kill. Honour to him, doom'd splendidly to die, Child of the city whose foster-child am I, Who, hotly leading up the ensanguin'd hill His charging thousand, fell without a word-- Fell, but shall fall not from our memory. Also for them let honour's voice be heard Who nameless sleep, while dull time covereth With no illustrious shade of laurel tree, But with the poppy alone, their deeds and death.

IV

GORDON

Idle although our homage be and vain, Who loudly through the door of silence press And vie in zeal to crown death's nakedness, Not therefore shall melodious lips refrain Thy praises, gentlest warrior without stain, Denied the happy garland of success, Foil'd by dark fate, but glorious none the less, Greatest of losers, on the lone peak slain Of Alp-like virtue. Not to-day, and not To-morrow, shall thy spirit's splendour be Oblivion's victim; but when God shall find All human grandeur among men forgot, Then only shall the world, grown old and blind, Cease, in her dotage, to remember Thee.

V

GORDON _(concluded)_

Arab, Egyptian, English--by the sword Cloven, or pierced with spears, or bullet-mown-- In equal fate they sleep: their dust is grown A portion of the fiery sands abhorred. And thou, what hast thou, hero, for reward, Thou, England's glory and her shame? O'erthrown Thou liest, unburied, or with grave unknown As his to whom on Nebo's height the Lord Showed all the land of Gilead, unto Dan; Judah sea-fringed; Manasseh and Ephraim; And Jericho palmy, to where Zoar lay; And in a valley of Moab buried him, Over against Beth-Peor, but no man Knows of his sepulchre unto this day.

VI

THE TRUE PATRIOTISM

The ever-lustrous name of patriot To no man be denied because he saw Where in his country's wholeness lay the flaw, Where, on her whiteness, the unseemly blot. England! thy loyal sons condemn thee.--What! Shall we be meek who from thine own breasts draw Our fierceness? Not ev'n _thou_ shalt overawe Us thy proud children nowise basely got. Be this the measure of our loyalty-- To feel thee noble and weep thy lapse the more. This truth by thy true servants is confess'd-- Thy sins, who love thee most, do most deplore. Know thou thy faithful! Best they honour thee Who honour in thee only what is best.

VII

RESTORED ALLEGIANCE

Dark is thy trespass, deep be thy remorse, O England! Fittingly thine own feet bleed, Submissive to the purblind guides that lead Thy weary steps along this rugged course. Yet ... when I glance abroad, and track the source More selfish far, of other nations' deed, And mark their tortuous craft, their jealous greed, Their serpent-wisdom or mere soulless force, Homeward returns my vagrant fealty, Crying, "O England, shouldst thou one day fall, Shatter'd in ruins by some Titan foe, Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all The world, and Truth less passionately free, And God the poorer for thine overthrow."

VIII

THE POLITICAL LUMINARY

A skilful leech, so long as we were whole: Who scann'd the nation's every outward part, But ah! misheard the beating of its heart. Sire of huge sorrows, yet erect of soul. Swift rider with calamity for goal, Who, overtasking his equestrian art, Unstall'd a steed full willing for the start, But wondrous hard to curb or to control. Sometimes we thought he led the people forth: Anon he seemed to follow where they flew; Lord of the golden tongue and smiting eyes; Great out of season, and untimely wise: A man whose virtue, genius, grandeur, worth Wrought deadlier ill than ages can undo.

IX

FOREIGN MENACE

I marvel that this land, whereof I claim The glory of sonship--for it _was_ erewhile A glory to be sprung of Britain's isle, Though now it well-nigh more resembles shame-- I marvel that this land with heart so tame Can brook the northern insolence and guile. But most it angers me, to think how vile Art thou, how base, from whom the insult came, Unwieldly laggard, many an age behind Thy sister Powers, in brain and conscience both; In recognition of man's widening mind And flexile adaptation to its growth: Brute bulk, that bearest on thy back, half loth, One wretched man, most pitied of mankind.

X

HOME-ROOTEDNESS

I cannot boast myself cosmopolite; I own to "insularity," although 'Tis fall'n from fashion, as full well I know. For somehow, being a plain and simple wight, I am skin-deep a child of the new light, But chiefly am mere Englishman below, Of island-fostering; and can hate a foe, And trust my kin before the Muscovite. Whom shall I trust if not my kin? And whom Account so near in natural bonds as these Born of my mother England's mighty womb, Nursed on my mother England's mighty knees, And lull'd as I was lull'd in glory and gloom With cradle-song of her protecting seas?

XI

OUR EASTERN TREASURE

In cobwebb'd corners dusty and dim I hear A thin voice pipingly revived of late, Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight, An idle decoration, bought too dear. The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear; Just pride is no mean factor in a State; The sense of greatness keeps a nation great; And mighty they who mighty can appear. It may be that if hands of greed could steal From England's grasp the envied orient prize, This tide of gold would flood her still as now: But were she the same England, made to feel A brightness gone from out those starry eyes, A splendour from that constellated brow?

XII

REPORTED CONCESSIONS

So we must palter, falter, cringe, and shrink, And when the bully threatens, crouch or fly.-- There are who tell me with a shuddering eye That war's red cup is Satan's chosen drink. Who shall gainsay them? Verily I do think War is as hateful almost, and well-nigh As ghastly, as this terrible Peace whereby We halt for ever on the crater's brink And feed the wind with phrases, while we know There gapes at hand the infernal precipice O'er which a gossamer bridge of words we throw, Yet cannot choose but hear from the abyss The sulphurous gloom's unfathomable hiss And simmering lava's subterranean flow.

XIII

NIGHTMARE

(_Written during apparent imminence of war_)